1UP.com has posted a new Q&A with Paul Wedgwood of Splash Damage. The interview offers a glimpse into Wedgwood's personal history. Splash Damage is the company behind the much anticipated Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

ET:QW serves as a prequel to the futuristic wars in the QUAKE II storyline. The game pits the armies of Earth’s Global Defense Force (GDF) against the invading alien Strogg in a multiplayer action shooter that transports players to the front lines in the battle for Earth.

So I spent about eight months not working but running a BBS, and just became absolutely obsessed with Commander Keen , initially, and then a little bit later, Wolfenstein , when that came out. Then I got the first Doom , and I was really into networking computers. I'd set myself stupid challenges, like I'd have a token ring switch, which was an odd IBM networking box, and I wanted to have a PC boot Windows from an Avail server via Ethernet, and then print via the server, via the token ring box, to an Intel JetDirect print server on an HP printer or something. I don't even know why I was that interested, but that would be my goal for the week. I'd set everything up in my bedroom and I'd be soldering cables and stuff. I think my brother came over and said, "Hey, if we can get IPX/SPX," which was kinda the precursor to TCP/IP, the Internet protocol, "working, apparently we can use this driver to make Doom work over a serial cable."

So we made our own serial RS232 cable, connected two computers together, plugged the computers in, got this protocol driver that we had to hack to make it work -- and I'm really not a very technical person; I've had to slop about with boxes and stuff -- and suddenly we were pushing left on this keyboard, and it was making a character move on the other screen. And I was just completely blown away. Even now, I remember the specific level in Doom, where my brother was jumping up the staircase and walking around the ledge around the outside, and I was watching him do it from my perspective on the other computer. I just couldn't believe it. Because it goes back to the days when I got expelled, because I wanted to chat with other people on the Link 480Zs, we got this chat program, and I'd type here and the text would appear on that screen. I just loved that. When I ran a BBS, the sound of modems connecting to my computer, or me connecting into a BBS, and typing, my text appearing, their text appearing on my screen, that kind of remote connectivity...I just felt incredibly excited by it.